


Six Feet Under, Still So Close

by buckybahrns (hop_in_my_moricarty)



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Flashbacks, Implied Relationships, death mentioned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-10
Updated: 2016-07-10
Packaged: 2018-07-22 18:31:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7449700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hop_in_my_moricarty/pseuds/buckybahrns
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's odd, he thinks, to be awake in a coma.<br/>//<br/>Bucky is under ice again, by his own request, and must deal with the consequences of a lighter sedation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Six Feet Under, Still So Close

You can be awake in a coma. He knows this.

It's surreal, everything is bright and white and transparent all at once. It's like a massive image of the brain, except that instead of the medulla oblongata and the hippocampus, there's just the spiderweb network of blood vessels. There he was, sitting at a desk, a real office desk with dark wood and a plastic protector under a desk calendar, and he was sitting there surrounded by the blown-up image of his brain. He thought it was hisbrain, at least. But he was looking down on the scene beyond himself, within himself, while still being present in the conversation. There were two other men, and they were him.

There was the young version of him with the neat hair and a slick uniform and tired eyes, Bucky. There was Him; the weapon he became, the Asset with his unkempt, stringy hair and a thousand-yard stare despite being hyperattentive to the conversations they all had. He could never remember what they said. There was another presence too, one that was shadowy and uncertain, who he could see just out of the corner of his eye as a quiet spectator. He knew he, the observer, and the him at the desk were the same but he's not sure how. That was okay, it felt fine. What hurt, what terrified, what stung and scraped and stabbed and  _hurt_ was the darkness.

He wasn't sure how he knew the darkness, how he was aware because the only time he felt himself was when it was bright. The lights were on and there were no monsters lurking under the cover of un-sight. But he knew the dark, where he spent most of his time, was painful and sad and achey and there was something missing. He didn't know what it was, didn't know much aside from  _James Buchanan Barnes_ , the sweet-tart taste of a fresh plum and the way the juice would run sticky into his hand and down his arm if he let it, and somebody else a little too far out of reach of his sticky hand, sweet-tart like a plum and as critical as his own name.

The darkness was where the memories flashed like a bad clip show, over-bright and hyperrealistic on a big screen that floated around him in the void of his mind where he could see himself, both detached and present. He would scream when they did, cry and pull at his hair when it hurt too much to remember, to be human. They were people, the people he hurt, and the people he didn't. He loved some of them, like the little girl with scraped knees and a hand-me-down dress that had passed through every little girl on the block, the scrawny young man who smiled softly at him with fever-bright eyes and babbled nonsense at him because the stolen medicine wasn't nearly enough.

There were a lot of eyes in these memories; the drawn and tired eyes of a slight woman who fed him despite having little enough, the sad eyes of the little girl who was now nearly grown as he hugged her with hat in hand and pack on shoulder, the playful eyes of three more boys who were too old to be babied and too young to work. There were the sunken, lived-in eyes of an old dock worker who had picked up the scent of salt and grime in his skin long before he had been born, the fear-filled eyes of a woman in a car, bleeding from the forehead while her husband lay dead beside her, folded neatly over his steering wheel.

The eyes hurt the most, but they were the bits he could recall from long memory-films, faces blurred and obscured beyond recognition, a group of men in mostly the same arrangements with him beside, always beside, the man with the sunny smile and the tired eyes that he knew to be the same as a sick little boy but who wasn't really. He's still a detached observer, but this time, in the dangerous darkness, he watches himself float in full color and feels the pain twice over as these memories play and replay and freeze and skip and distort and repeat and repeat and repeat. He knows he is too close to the surface in the dark, what surface he knows not, but there are voices that are not his own and are not radio transmission staticy like the memories, They are rich, smooth voices and tell him it is okay and to please go back to sleep and to get better.

It's odd, he thinks, to be awake in a coma.


End file.
